We’re here at the Milk Studios in Hollywood for Microsoft’s big mysterious Los Angeles media event. The off-duty actors and actresses are offering champagne flutes, the tech journalists are ignoring them while making sure their laptops work, and the electronic music is pumping as we all wait to see what is in store.TechCrunch will be liveblogging the entire event here, so stay tuned[...]

The Swedes are the first to get their hands on the new HDTVs from Swedish furniture store Ikea. The Uppleva TV, an all-in-one TV/cabinet/audio system�is now on sale at the company’s Stockholm store for roughly $1,000, and will trickle into other European locations in the next few weeks.Uppleva went on sale June 14 in Sweden and is set to go on sale in Berlin, Germany�on July 2, GigaOM reports. Ikea has said select stores in Italy, Poland, and France will also get the TV, but it won’t reach the U.S. until 2013.Ikea released a few more specs on the TV as it went on sale for the first time. It offers full 1080p HD video, is compatible with MP3, MP4, DivX HD, and JPEG files, and co[...]

MightyText, a startup founded by two ex-Googlers, has taken the beta wraps off of its over-the-top messaging service, which extends an Android phone?s SMS capabilities to PCs and tablets. Using the same phone number, a MightyText user can send and receive text messages from a PC or tablet browser in perfect synchronization with their SMS inboxes. As long as your phone is on and has a data connection, you can pretty much text from anywhere.Generally any new over-the-top messaging app launch makes operators cringe as it represents another potential blow to their lucrative SMS revenues. That?s not the case with MightyText, founder Maneesh Arora explained. Every message sent using the service u[...]